Data Capture and your digital marketing campaigns

Chris | Friday 11th December, 2015

The more you know about your customers, the better targeted your marketing campaigns can be, as well as tailoring your products or services to better fit your audience. Data Capture is an essential part of that overall strategy so we wanted to discuss how fantastic data gathering campaigns work.

A Macro Conversion is your main objective, such as a sale or enquiry, but you must also be aware of Micro Conversions which include things such as capturing an email address, contact details and other pieces of information to be used for future marketing purposes. These are invaluable for building closer relations with your audiences.

Data capture should be an on-going process, with databases constantly being added to and updated. Not always easy when so many people are increasingly wary of divulging personal details online.

So you need to be a bit savvy when it comes to capturing data from your digital marketing campaigns, implementing subtle but effective methods to obtain information in a way that is unobtrusive and does not put people off.

Collecting Data

There are several ways in which you can encourage your website visitors to provide you with data.

Incentivising your audience to provide information works well. You could consider giving away a gift or offering a discount on orders. Encouraging current database recipients to recommend a friend with an incentive is another option.

Running competitions online is a great way to engage customers and gain new ones as well as picking up new data. You can include an open-ended or multiple- choice question as part of the entry process.

As an example, Country & Town House will enter you for a £500 over night stay at a country estate, just for entering you details.

Not only did this promote local Welsh produce but it also provided the opportunity for the tourist office to collect more details about what type of holidays users might be interested in. Along with asking where the user lives, they also asked two multiple-choice questions about leisure activities and who they plan to visit with. This is very helpful information for future mailings.

You can also consider asking for information via a survey, the results of which would be of interest and importance to the consumer. This also provides you with a powerful piece of copy to run online and further encourage comment and engagement. Try to offer a fresh, original insight into the business you are in which would be valuable for all your current and potential customers. This could be around something that is topical, changing government legislation for example and how it would affect the customer or a topic that is emotive without being controversial.

Timings

With all online marketing campaigns, you need to consider when is the best time to engage your audience. Product depending, interactions will usually increase at lunchtimes and evenings during a normal working week but if you are targeting non-working mothers the best time might be mid-morning on a week day, if young, single people then the best time could be as they commute to or from work.

It’s not too difficult to work out when your audience is online. You can use Facebook Insights and look at your Twitter ‘tweet details’ to see how posts have performed and you can sign up for Google Analytics. Schedule your posts and tweets for the times when they are best received. This may take a bit of time trying out various times for different types of messages but this will help streamline your social media campaigns and make them more effective.

You can see from our very own Google Analytics that our website's busiest times are between 10am & 4pm and tend it tends to be busier at the beginning of the week.

Getting more information

First of all you need to consider what information you already have and what additional information would be useful. There is no point in asking a question just for the sake of it or to tick a box when you can’t see how the information would be useful.

Also, think beyond targeted business questions, consider topics that could give you further useful insights into your customer base beyond the normal data. For example, knowing someone’s age or whether they have children. If you sign up to the Zizzi's website, you're asked a few specific questions that will help dictate how they market to you.

Another example is how insurance companies try to get dates and details on other types of insurance policies so that they can cross-sell.

Honing in on your customer details means you can more tightly target your messaging which in turn means it is more likely to be read or have an impact.

In the example below from Welcome Yorkshire, the questions asked are beyond the basic contact details and areas of interest will allow the tourist board to send out specific, targeted information such as offers on sports holidays or free child places etc. Thus making future campaigns more successful.

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